Pyrrha
I was waiting for
you in the storm.
You came to the
corner so
coiled up in its
joy.
You certainly
asked for little,
the things one
asks for
before the world
disappears in the
flood
but you did not
know
how much we would
have loved you
I, your father,
God
the faded season
if you had been beautiful.
Stop going crazy.
Don’t you see how
everything around us is doing that?
The neon sizzling
on the billboards
the frenzy of the
oriflammes on the fish tanks
the bombast of the
morning
the sense of duty,
none of this can
touch you.
You were naked in
your eternal adolescence,
you knew that
chastity
is not prêt-à-porter
you need to give
it away to somebody
(I say nakedness:
chastity never bothered you).
Stop yelling,
leave that to the
paintings and books
that you don’t
like.
You’ll have
something to hate all the same.
Save it for
winter.
I know why you’re
bringing me herbs:
every act you take
is justified
by the gaze of the
Virgin
over your bedside
over your sleep,
over the sweat
common to faith
and flesh
you don’t know gratuitousness
you once told me,
but there’s
nothing gratuitous in devotion
there wasn’t in
the wrinkles
that you held in a
fist
nor in that little
bit of love you took in,
your poor pigeon
collection.
The storm doesn’t
scare you
if you pass
through it absorbed in the evening,
the herbs you
wanted to give me
are getting cold
in your hand
they are glass
beads
and yet you go on
believing
they will give
rise to men.
Speech of the Mountain
For Ida
The yell that you
let out
from the silence
of the sinkhole
triggers my
anxiety
which you carry
around
while looking for
truffles,
the falls, the
finds
with which you
happily stain your life.
It’s a helpless
hour, pale
before your
plunder,
we robbed of our
own yell,
wait for the echo
to give us back,
in yours,
our unknown voice.
The Science of Goodbyes
The wintery light
that erases our
steps
in the doorway
befogs our replay
and doesn’t beg
for caresses and
abandon.
Let’s seek refuge
in its glance
swap throw-away
lines:
see you tomorrow
see you soon bye forever
If only he had a grip on reality, you think to yourself.
If only she had slightly smaller teeth, I think to myself.
The fog makes it
easy to confuse
the beyond with
our first date,
memory crumbles
without a
whimper.
What we have been
at times,
what we have
loved at times
calls us back and
slips away
quietly. That’s
why
I turn over in
the ripped
pocket of my
memory
the forgettable
words
that we said
then.
Matchsticks
My father would
make
ships out of matchsticks
ships with too
many sails
and too many cannons
that were nice
because they
weren’t a
metaphor for anything.
He would sit on
the ground
with his mug
poised
over the pliant
work site
of his weird art
mincing up
matchsticks
that he would dry
and glue
to a frame in the
air.
How happy he was
to breath
wind
into the bones of
a ship
deprived of
oceans to imagine.
Mirage
of Selinunte
Teleopus builds temples.
He keeps them in the storage closet.
I
don’t really like looking at them
—he says—and anyone who wants
them can have them
You
see? The pronaos is shaky like
a
granny’s teeth, the pediment is looking at us cross-eyed.
If
I were a cockroach, I wouldn’t pray
in
the shadow of this silly knock-off
but
here there’s the imprint of my doubting
thumbs
on the time I handled.
Thus
I don’t regret the failed tries
I
don’t care about a rebirth
fresh
linen, without typos.
And
what about you? Don’t tell me you toss
out
the failed roses?
First
volumes
They age well
in their deception
those unique and unmatched
first volumes:
encyclopedias histories
of Italian literature
of ancient Egypt of music
universal histories
fragments of magnificent
dust-bound series
of which my father would
only buy the first title.
I look at the bookcases
jam-packed with As without Bs
with detective novels cut off
before the culprit could confess
with histories written by reluctant
winners
with biographies that omit the exiled and
the dead
with romances bereft of climaxes
and I think how much
those choked-up speeches
resemble my own.
I think of that cheap,
short-winded culture
with its stumps that toss and turn
to thumb their noses at me
and I know that the volumes I haven’t
seen
I will never mourn them as the con
of their lonely companions
frozen forever at the first chapter.
Nests
My father distracted by the swallows
misplaces the discharge papers.
He knows the animals’ deaths
that are so exact and casual
but he forgot about his own
on the nightstand with his papers.
my father asked for a happy song
and he got an imperfect silence:
It was me. I was buried in a room
under the sleepy chapter headings of
books.
He wanted a son with his head on straight
a masculine son who slept little
and he got one who stayed awake
to enjoy the rest of the wishy-washy.
The swallows built their nests
on the photo mural of the saint
that silenced the valley.
My father sitting on a bench
showed me one afternoon
in September those nests
I had never looked at.
Corso
Garibaldi
What a range tomorrow has
The way the old men about it:
politics, weapons
the fate of the world
how it’s nice to fuck
and not to lead.
The old men walk
with their hands behind their backs
to keep them away
from the vent of the sex
and then you’ll hear them say
about a pretty girl passing by:
Fucking
cunt…
and in their heart still the whistle
of the senses flowing the other way.
The Seesaw
The stale songs
the glasses full
the tired music
of the country festival
didn’t manage to
bother you
in your
breathless oscillation
from San Paolo to
Puerto Cortés
from the first
sound to the good sleep
from the mouth to
the last swig
from the skin of
the fig to the wall
where you left a
handprint.
What you were
looking at right where
your mother had
been a girl
where you
secretly returned
what you saw
jumping into the dark
was a gift of
memory
intact in your
eyes locked onto the sea
the Adriatic Sea,
the farthest away.
The
Photographer’s Storefront
Say no more
I think I know them
those secrets so
worldly
exposed to the
light of the faces
staring out of
the frame
the formalin
desires
in the white
refuge
of a photograph.
The yes is a maybe now that you are married
and waiting for
the first night’s baptism
of blood and
sperm
or you miss other
nights
the unconfessed
rendezvous
that leave you
almost smiling
under the glass
of the striking close-up.
Little
Beggers
Time in the house
was a laboratory
of styles
the comic style
of the dogs
the tragic one of
the cats
the foolish
barking
the ruthless
meowing
of the trumpet
players.
So many snouts
haunted
by your jazz
notes the aromas
that broke out in
the kitchen.
You had a name
for each one
that you made up
in an arcane
language
that you still
speak to me
in the food
divvied up and
in heat over the
brazier.
February
When madness grazed
your shoulder
you were praying,
breath and womb and life-blood
listening, your
naked body soaking
in the Hail Mary.
A doctor spoke
about a mystical
crisis, he was not
a doctor of the
church. A little
homemade ecstasy,
it lasted
half a season but
it left you a pledge.
You kept praying
under the sheets
and you would
smile from the cushion
peering at the
winter silent on the doorstep.
Schools,
Churches
Schools, churches, sacred places
give me the same sense of dismay.
Here they are with their eyes clinging to
the glass
of the bulletin boards, their maxims
tormented by breaths, the clouds
swollen with zeal for the ora et labora
sine
sanguine humiliter
—the dander that aspires
to reach the studious shoulder.
The stale lips of the one who
neither teaches nor learns anything
who only knows how to read obituaries.
The same pain, the rose
plucked apart in the baptismal font
the quivering bow-tie
on the white throat of the children
in line for communion
with their sexes eavesdropping
the white smoke, as well,
of the good acts
given up to heaven.
The same wound,
the man
who wails a plea
with his poodle
swallowed up by the light
of the Chapel of the Relics.
Two
Acts: A Little Theatreid
The actor bends the bit
to his comic fancy, to a frenzied
ego, formidable like a flood.
It’s a play by Ibsen?
Whatever:
to the eager and
derelict theater hack
it’s enough to have
the scraps
of the audience,
a couple of smuggled
laughs so as not
to die
in the dressing
room in front of the mirror.
The actor from
before performs a pochade
bedecked with
letters and betrayals
those planned,
and those dreamt of,
merely a charade
of the mind.
Here comes his
line, such a trivial one:
Please pass me the pork chops…
The actor can’t
resist himself
and seizes the
opportunity to bubble over :
Try this: it’s the tastiest part,
he yells to the
other showing him
his fly. The room
goes silent.
No one laughs
dumbfounded in
the dark.
It’s the end of
the act.
His last, probably.
Identity
In a ravine of sleep
I hear a sound of footsteps.
I recognize him.
I mirror myself in him: he is
my rival
who conquers ambitions in pajamas
from the other side of life
he watches me, winks and
falls asleep
with the sort of skill that I lack.
From the shore of
the survivors
the colony of
cats
keeps watch over their
colleague
who floats in the
absence
made eternal on
the street
and stares at a poster
that ignores him.
The colony of
cats
keeps its vigil
and wonders where
it can go
staying so still
seeing its
reflection in the void
without carousels
around
not even a dull
mouse
to play Taps.
Despertar
To
die at age
eighteen is wrong,
at ninety it’s superfluous
Bigio Graus
Maybe you thought
you were
inside the
placenta
right before
birth
or it was a
complaint congealed
in a bloodless
syllable
that escaped from
your mouth
from the unseeing
glimmer
kindled under
your eyelids,
the chrysalis of
awakening
the hassle of
seeing each other again.
A Fantasy
of Bigio Graus
I’m at McGregor’s with A.
who I haven’t seen in twenty years.
Since then he has become a writer.
He lives in the city, I don’t remember
which,
and he makes it out to the country
only
rarely but when he can
he
jumps at the chance.
He is affable as
always;
I take the
opportunity
to talk to him
about myself.
Everything I know
anyone can know it
but that is not a sufficient
provision for so many winters
of happy insipience.
As someone once said
I know less about it than I did before,
and the liberties I take with my laziness,
with my ignorant view of the landscape,
are more intolerable by the day.
Being a wordsmith, a writer, an écrivain…
I who when I hear the word culture
reach for the remote.
I am an expert at nodding my head
at things I don’t understand.
As to my philosophy professor
I just remember the belch
that escaped unscathed from the
eternal return
the day he had stomach trouble
the classes I put to good use
the ones I forgot
you tell me: what’s the difference?
If I didn’t learn to tie a tie it wasn’t by chance
and the fact that I never wear one
doesn’t give me an excuse.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this
nor why I’m stringing together thoughts
as though no one were listening.
Maybe it’s only an echo
of my memory, of the poems
read in the shitter
sent to my brain, stuffed in the bottom
of a trunk frittered away and then sorely missed.
You ask me if I have something to tell.
I quit writing at fifteen,
right when you started.
I don’t know if I envy you, let me think about it,
I might be able to find the thread
of a moral. Take this for what it’s worth,
you might like it: envy
is a hard bitch to tame,
but only if we insist on taming it.
If that doesn’t make sense, let me break it down.
When you’re walking along in the country
and you ask someone you meet for a cigarette
it seems like everything exists and comes alive
solely to acknowledge you. Am I exaggerating?
Yes, I’m exaggerating. Of course
there’s always that really local poet
who will sniff your jacket
and ask you to write a preface
for the collection he can’t manage to get published.
You commit to it with a handshake
(only to snub him with irreproachable style
at the last minute due to a snag in the process,
an illness, an unexpected death, yours, his).
The editor-in-chief of “The Spitball,”
who has admired you since nursery school,
he would stitch you a quilt with his teeth, he prides
himself
on the seven novels he wrote over the summer
while on holiday in Silvi Marina.
You get nasty, you do laps around him
with an imaginary muleta,
you call him Proust.
The jerk thanks you.
If you buy me a
glass of grappa
you smile at my pettiness
as an intellectual to-go.
I’m smiling too, but you don’t know
that this smile
I would like to give it back to you full of nails
so that it explodes on your face.
In the meantime let’s drink like two friends
talking about important things:
--Geez if you’re drinking
–I can do better. Buy me
another and you’ll see.
And we laugh together
like a couple of cut-wives.
That’s how it is: I envy you, I hate you,
I hate you and your name that does
cartwheels in the shadow of an Elzevir
on Kyrghyz literature,
I loathe your little prettied up
ideas, the fault line that runs down
your forehead to make the right words
come out, the perfect words,
that hypocritical obsession on parade.
Don’t think badly of me,
I would only like to see you sink
into the quicklime of your autograph,
so that you die like a monument
to the forgotten show-off
the fate of the never-seller
who fudges monologues in front of the mirror.
Besides you’re little more than a journalist.
How ‘bout another drink?
The next day I
find myself sleeping
deaf to the
worries of the dishware
my son does his
thing:
feeds cries
reverses the order
of his movements
changes his tone.
I look at him
and imagine him as an adult
with no more
hints of childishness,
no mercy for my ear
brooding in the
bone meal
that I will have become.
I watch him looking
at me stern
and pious and I’m already afraid.
When I dream of
writing a novel
or an editorial
for the “Corriere”
I hear a ravenous,
African squeal
that wants to
haunt my life
and I who can’t
tie a knot
who glower over
a dried-up dream,
the limp teat
of the crouched suckling bitch.
Commenti
Posta un commento